For Adorno, popular culture is not just bad art—it enslaves us to repetition and robs us of our aesthetic freedom
posted to MetaFilter by koavf at 4:28 PM on February 25, 2018 (58 comments)

Yudane or yukone, known as tangzhong in Chinese, is a bread baking technique that begins with a water (or milk) roux, heating flour and liquid to 65C to gelatinize the starches. It produces loaves that are tender, springy, moist, and resistant to staling, with a significantly different crumb. Its most famous application is in Hokkaido Milk Bread, but is also useful for bagels, rolls, and any application where a tender crumb or long shelf life is desirable.
posted to MetaFilter by uncleozzy at 7:04 AM on February 15, 2018 (19 comments)

How Angels in America put Roy Cohn into the definitive story of AIDS: This oral history is lightly adapted from The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. (SL Vulture).
posted to MetaFilter by mandolin conspiracy at 6:39 AM on February 14, 2018 (5 comments)

Biologists call this need “sleep pressure”: Stay up too late, build up sleep pressure. Feeling drowsy in the evenings? Of course you are—by being awake all day, you’ve been generating sleep pressure! But like “dark matter,” this is a name for something whose nature we do not yet understand. The more time you spend thinking about sleep pressure, the more it seems like a riddle game out of Tolkien: What builds up over the course of wakefulness, and disperses during sleep? Is it a timer? A molecule that accrues every day and needs to be flushed away? What is this metaphorical tally of hours, locked in some chamber of the brain, waiting to be wiped clean every night? [slAtlantic]
posted to MetaFilter by ellieBOA at 4:33 AM on February 12, 2018 (81 comments)

How a late-blossoming classics don became Britain’s most beloved intellectual by Charlotte Higgins examines how Mary Beard went from being a Cambridge professor of classics to being the kind of celebrity who has poems written about her and is depicted in Lego. Twice.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 5:23 AM on January 30, 2018 (33 comments)

Flordia’s prisoners are going on strike. “...For no less than one month, they will refuse to work in the kitchen, the laundry, on farms, in maintenance, or in other jobs upon which the prisons depend to function. They will boycott products and services, forgo phone calls and the canteen, and engage in other activities to disrupt the prison economy.”

In addition to demands for higher wages, the reinstatement of parole, ending canteen price gouging, restoration of voting rights, and Stopping unpaid work for hurricane cleanup, inmates are also demanding a end to the overcrowded and deteriorating conditions of Florida prisons “There are so many unexplained deaths,” Lisa Graybill, deputy legal director for criminal justice reform at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told The Intercept. “They’re just appalling.”
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 9:45 AM on January 15, 2018 (19 comments)

But the more of SNL I watched this year, the more I felt like I was watching a different show than everybody else was. I was tempted to call it the worst show of 2017, but I’m not sure that’s what I mean. It’s certainly made with a certain degree of love and affection that marks it as the work of talented people.

No, what SNL was was the emptiest show of 2017, and the fact that it was so over-praised makes me worry we’ll learn nothing at all from this particular moment in pop cultural history. And there’s no better way to talk about that emptiness than to consider just how poorly SNL handles the current occupant of the White House, even as it clearly wants to say something daring.

Saturday Night Live’s current cultural cachet is built on a mirage [Todd VanDerWerff, Vox]
posted to MetaFilter by Atom Eyes at 9:39 AM on December 28, 2017 (87 comments)

Barry reacts to Quin's announcement by throwing a glass in his face. Again, when love is on the line, and social mobility at stake, Barry's only recourse is violence. Another way to put it is, Quin represents one level of violence (that of state against state) while Barry represents a highly personal level of violence, one that Quin doesn’t seem to be prepared for. He recoils as though poleaxed. Startled and horrified by Barry's outburst, he, again, threatens Nora's family and demands that Barry be punished. "I'm an Englishman and a man of property!" he splutters, thinking his social status should protect him from this kind of violence. Later, we'll see how social status, in this narrative, is nothing but a scam, created specifically to protect the wealthy from the poor.
posted to MetaFilter by smcg at 9:37 AM on December 27, 2017 (39 comments)

The Journal of African American Studies devoted its September 2017 issue to Prince. You can read and/or download all the articles at the journal's site.
posted to MetaFilter by goatdog at 7:47 AM on December 14, 2017 (7 comments)

Learning something new can be challenging, but sometimes, it can take you places you’d never imagine. Kimiko Nishimoto was 72 years old when she picked up a camera, and it’s transformed her life over the past 17 years. Now at 89, she's enjoying wide-spread attention for her creative self-portrait photography.
posted to MetaFilter by Johnny Wallflower at 8:50 PM on December 9, 2017 (4 comments)

How intentional communities try to combat loneliness, a detrimental condition experienced by 40% of Americans. "Intentional communities[...] are intimate: a couple dozen apartments or single-family homes, built around central squares or common spaces. And they’re operated in ways intended to keep the community connected — with weekly dinners at a community center or other common area, shared babysitting services, shared gardens or games or even vacations. If you don’t want to participate, fine; no one will come pester you to play a pick-up game you don’t want to play or join a committee you don’t want to join. But when you need the community — because a spouse is away or a baby is sick or you’re just plain lonely and would like some companionship — it’s there for you."
posted to MetaFilter by cocoaviolet at 10:16 AM on November 30, 2017 (27 comments)

The browser that Mozilla built jumps into a new chapter on November 14th. They're saying this is pretty big jump as they're giving Firefox release 57 the moniker "Quantum".
posted to MetaFilter by Juso No Thankyou at 7:47 AM on November 13, 2017 (182 comments)

The surviving footage of the only time Coltrane performed of A Love Supreme live. (Previously, 6 yrs ago, broken link)
posted to MetaFilter by OmieWise at 5:54 AM on November 9, 2017 (14 comments)

100 years ago today, the Petrograd Soviet's Military Revolutionary Committee toppled Russia's Provisional Government, leading to the Bolsheviks' assumption of state power.
posted to MetaFilter by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:51 AM on November 7, 2017 (88 comments)

“Recognizing these difficulties, a growing number of activists within the industry are developing a different plan. Their insight is as compelling as it is counterintuitive: the best people to confront the power of the tech giants may be their own employees. First, they want to teach their colleagues to see that tech work is work, even though it doesn’t take place in a factory. Then, they want to organise them, so that rank-and-file workers can begin to bring political transparency and democratic accountability to the platforms they have worked to build. Call them the Tech Left.“ - For decades, tech companies promised to make the world better. As that dream falls apart, disillusioned insiders are trying to take back control. By Moira Weigel for The Guardian.
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 9:42 AM on November 2, 2017 (26 comments)

22 Dogs Who Just Want To Say Hello
20 Totally Random Animal Photos That Will Make You Pee Yourself
22 Photos That Prove It's Easier With A Second Dog
28 Bizarre Photoshopped Hybrid Animals We Wish Existed IRL
20 Dogs Who Are Doing Us A Kindness
posted to MetaFilter by Johnny Wallflower at 9:09 PM on October 15, 2017 (7 comments)

“In some cases – as with Greece’s Syriza, Spain’s Podemos and France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon – the leftist explosion took place outside the political mainstream. In Britain, it happened within the venerable Labour Party. Young recruits were joined by older returners who had left the party during the Blair years. The membership swelled from 200,000 in May 2015 to 299,755, with a further 189,703 affiliated supporters and 121,295 registered supporters (at more than 600,000, Labour’s membership is now among the highest in western Europe).“ - How the Labour left triumphed: the inside story, George Eaton (New Statesmen)
posted to MetaFilter by The Whelk at 9:40 AM on October 12, 2017 (49 comments)

"The Primordial Gound" by Justin E. H. Smith (The Public Domain Review, October 2017; but reworked from earlier articles): "Klopp records that in May of 1777 Kant's ship suffered heavy damages in a storm in the South China Sea." "From The New Ecyclopedia" by Byron Landry (Conjunctions, April 2017): "Little is known about the pre-Socratic philosopher Polycyathus, and that little unlikeable: ... he believed that, of all the forms of governance, tyranny was best, because 'it breeds monuments.'" "The Doctor is Who?" by Heavy (alternatehistory.com, July 2017): "Several actors were considered to play the Second Doctor ... Peter Jeffrey, Valentine Dyall and Patrick Troughton were all approached but each declined the role."
posted to MetaFilter by Wobbuffet at 5:34 PM on October 8, 2017 (11 comments)

In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as 'George' instead. The difference amazed her. 'A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.' The words, as written by George, had an appeal that Catherine could only envy. She also, perhaps, felt a little robbed. 'He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.'

Anne Enright's Irish Laureate for Fiction lecture about sexism in publishing.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:16 PM on September 29, 2017 (4 comments)

Updated your mental image of a dinosaur to include feathers? You're probably still not picturing a plausible animal, much less a realistic depiction of a dinosaur. Artist C.M. Kosemen points out that paleoart historically has just "skinned" the fossiled remains, creating improbable creature designs that lack all kinds of soft tissue and features that wouldn't show up in most fossils. To illustrate our collective failures of imagination, he's re-envisioned swans, baboons, elephants, zebras, hippos and rhinos as if they were drawn by future paleontologists working only from fossilized remains.
posted to MetaFilter by deludingmyself at 12:35 PM on September 24, 2017 (35 comments)

Watering a Flower (花に水) is a cassette of ambient synthesizer music by Haruomi Hosono, commissioned by MUJI in 1984 for use as store background music. Well, sort of.
posted to MetaFilter by theodolite at 8:14 PM on September 6, 2017 (31 comments)

Stuart Jeffries, Foreign Policy: Verdirbt Richard David Precht die Deutsche Philosophie? - "Aber Precht lässt das kalt. Als einer der berühmtesten und gefragtesten Figuren einer neuen deutschen Philosophiewelle argumentiert er, dass die moderne Philosophie, um relevant zu bleiben, von ihrem Elfenbeinturm herunterkommen und mit der Masse in Kontakt treten muss."
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 8:09 PM on August 15, 2017 (5 comments)

Everything is terrible, it's true. Everybody just needs to relax with Sax With Kids Hour. Because seriously. Everything is still Terrible.
posted to MetaFilter by philip-random at 12:17 AM on August 13, 2017 (9 comments)

What online resources are available that cover the business and marketing sides of iOS development? I'm interested in discussion boards, blogs, articles, professional resources.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by alms at 12:21 PM on August 10, 2017 (1 comment)

Aphex Twin recently launched a countdown on his website. It began on the same day he performed at Field Day festival in London, where he sold a mysterious 12" and, for the first time in his career, live-streamed his set. And then he dropped the biggest bomb: an expanded collection of the Richard D. James releases since 1991, even pulling from some of his alternate alias side projects (AFX, Polygon Window, The Tuss, etc). You can buy FLAC or MP3s, or use the embedded streaming audio player with unlimited access to the entire catalog, and there's still more to come...
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 11:01 AM on July 21, 2017 (21 comments)

Demi Adejuyigbe, aka @electrolemon, has scored a sneak-peak of Will Smith's new track for Disney's Aladdin! Check it out quick before Disney take it down. He's also been posting videos of Will Smith's lesser-known film soundtrack work for Arrival, Moonlight, and Hacksaw Ridge. (They're all end-credit tracks so contain some spoilers).
posted to MetaFilter by EndsOfInvention at 1:30 AM on July 20, 2017 (5 comments)

 The Reformation did a lot more than transform Christianity. - " This paradox—that the Reformation could birth a peasant revolt while its instigator rallied behind the princes—is a picture of Protestantism’s confusing political legacy in miniature. Protestantism arguably brought about many of the preconditions for the Enlightenment and liberalism, and at the very least introduced Europe to a headier skepticism of authority than had prevailed before. (Indeed, Roper credits the Reformation with sparking the secularization of the West.) On the other hand, the release of significant portions of life—namely politics and economics—-from the purview of religious authority may have expanded certain freedoms, but it didn’t result in a betterment of conditions for the most disadvantaged, even as it helped transform the Christian message into something far more internal and private than that of the earlier Church."  By Elizabeth Bruenig
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 9:19 PM on July 16, 2017 (24 comments)

Hollow Knight's Charming Art Sets the Bar for Hand Drawn Games [PC Gamer] “I've been obsessed with indie metroidvania Hollow Knight [Release Trailer] [Beneath and Beyond Trailer] since its launch late last month. Apart from having fun and challenging combat and a massive amount of game to explore, I've found myself sucked in by the moody, Dark Souls-inspired setting developer Team Cherry has created. Despite a mostly monotone dark color palette, the dank corridors of Hallownest still feel vibrant thanks to how Hollow Knight mixes fantastic hand drawn art with more modern effects. It's a lot of little things all coming together that make Hollow Knight look so good, many of which you may not actively notice. It's a 2D game with 2D animations, but Team Cherry's use of dynamic lighting, shadows, and particle effects do a huge amount of work to solidify those 2D sketches and make them feel real in whatever space they're in. And while the character designs are relatively clean and simple, animation fills them with personality. ”
posted to MetaFilter by Fizz at 7:58 PM on July 12, 2017 (6 comments)

Asmara Eritrea has one benefit from that Italian occupation: a collection of beautiful Modernist buildings. If all goes well, it'll be named a Unesco World Heritage Site very soon.
posted to MetaFilter by MovableBookLady at 8:28 PM on July 10, 2017 (15 comments)

You gots to suffer, sacrifice then resurrect (resurrect) resurrect (assume all links NSFW) So back in 1995-1997, back when there was a West-East coast rivalry in hip-hop and Biggie and Tupac died because gangsta rappers carry guns, while A Tribe Called Quest and their ilk were being called the intelligent alternative, in Queens there was born a duo called Darc Mind. They were, according to critics who came later, timeless and timely, in the mid-aughts. Originally label-mates of Wu-Tang on Loud Records, which promptly fell apart and damned them to obscurity, they later found and were re-released on Anticon in 2006, 2007, and 2013, home of goofy, cerebral alt-rap like Doseone and Daedelus, with whom they have almost nothing and everything and what in common.
posted to MetaFilter by saysthis at 7:01 AM on July 3, 2017 (6 comments)

"we designed a chatbot, a smart computer program that deployed an adaptable script. In the two days ahead of the election earlier this month, the chatbot struck up conversations with thousands of young people between 18 and 25 years old on Tinder. The chatbot talked about politics, with the aim of getting voters to help oust the Conservative government."
posted to MetaFilter by roolya_boolya at 2:04 AM on June 23, 2017 (29 comments)

And it is as adorable as you think it is.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis at 1:35 AM on June 17, 2017 (21 comments)

#TheRootTrip: From June 12-18, follow author Lawrence Ross on the blackest road trip ever: driving 3,000 miles from Los Angeles to "the tobacco farm where Booker T. Washington was enslaved in Roanoke, Va.," while patronizing as many black-owned businesses as possible along the way. "We’re also going black in time, and that means pulling out The Negro Motorist Green Book," 1957 edition.
posted to MetaFilter by nicebookrack at 12:34 PM on June 14, 2017 (31 comments)

The New York Times has published a longform interview of Chelsea Manning "In January 2017, after being locked up at five different facilities, in conditions a United Nations expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” Manning had received a surprise commutation by President Barack Obama. Four months later, she was free, trying to adjust to life in a world she helped shape."
posted to MetaFilter by indubitable at 2:20 PM on June 12, 2017 (22 comments)

Everything Carrie Ever Wondered About on Sex and the City
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 3:31 PM on June 6, 2017 (28 comments)

Helen Marnie, previously of LadyTron, has released her latest album "Strange Words and Weird Wars"
posted to MetaFilter by rebent at 9:00 PM on June 1, 2017 (5 comments)

When I first started as a typesetter back in 1962, I knew almost nothing about its history. But I learned on the job from people who'd been in the trade and from books. One name that seldom came up was W.A. Dwiggins. I started in newspapers and Times Roman was the font, a more boring typeface has not been devised. Dwiggins' fonts weren't like that.
posted to MetaFilter by MovableBookLady at 6:49 AM on May 22, 2017 (6 comments)

Last December, the University of Oregon hosted the second Tiptree Symposium, this year focusing on the works of writer Ursula K. Le Guin. The videos of all the panels and speeches are available for streaming.
posted to MetaFilter by mixedmetaphors at 8:36 AM on May 5, 2017 (4 comments)

My aunt showed me a knife she got from a street vendor in Thailand. Evidently, the merchant made quite a show of the various ways it can be used, for peeling veggies, slicing, filleting fish, etc. I was able to find a somewhat similar knife made by JinLi, but it was lacking the peeling feature in the center. Any idea where I could read more about this knife or figure out how to use it? Link.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Happydaz at 4:22 PM on April 23, 2017 (6 comments)

I'd like to find a good place to work from remotely with my laptop in NYC (preferably Manhattan) for two days next week. In the Bay Area, we have coffeeshops where for a reasonable hourly fee you can essentially rent a table and wi-fi, and patronize the cafe as desired on top of that. Guarantees good internet and no side-eye from employees for taking up space for long periods. Is there anything like that in NY? Google is not turning it up on a quick search.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by eugenen at 11:17 AM on April 21, 2017 (16 comments)

New Music From Prince, Set For Release Friday, The Subject Of A Suit From His Estate from NPR. Here's the title track Deliverance [SoundCloud link].
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 10:00 AM on April 19, 2017 (11 comments)

An internet posts a C programming tutorial, in which the reader is taught how to build a toy text editor for unix. Hackernews trades examples of favorite toy text editors and favorite toy programming languages. A particularly haunting comment is posted by one Hackernews: a Haskell program that translates C to Rust, which gives us a brief peek into the grotesque Godless painscape where the Rust Evangelism Strike Force plans its webshit-brigading operations.

webshit weekly is an annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts.
posted to MetaFilter by Foci for Analysis at 4:08 PM on April 15, 2017 (50 comments)

Wounded anti-Milo protester speaks. Earlier this year, a Milo Yiannopoulos supporter shot and seriously injured a protester on the University of Washington campus. The victim, "Hex", recently gave an interview on KEXP expounding on why he is not seeking prison time for the shooter and why he prefers dialog and restorative justice over retribution, as well as other things: his medical ordeal and his happiness at marrying his partner while in hospital. Well worth reading. (Audio link; edited transcript)
posted to MetaFilter by splitpeasoup at 2:42 PM on April 1, 2017 (31 comments)

Sebastian Gorka is a Trump advisor on terrorism, has ties(?) to Nazi collaborators, and political science PhD from Corvinus University in Hugary. What's his dissertation like? Daniel Nexon reviews: Sebastian Gorka May Be a Far-Right Nativist, but for Sure He’s a Terrible Scholar
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 6:02 PM on March 28, 2017 (40 comments)

The Hague's buildings in Mondrian's iconic colors Many buildings in The Hague are using Mondrian's blue-yellow-red-white color scheme to celebrate the art movement's 100th anniversary. I hope they keep it up; it looks great.
posted to MetaFilter by MovableBookLady at 6:38 AM on March 27, 2017 (14 comments)

I have all the conventional baking ingredients except milk, and would like to make something brunchish. I could use yogurt as a substitute but would prefer not to. What is my most delicious option? Thanks!
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Going To Maine at 11:08 AM on March 26, 2017 (7 comments)

Just that: does Donald Trump have, or did he ever have, a driver's license? Can he even drive anything other than a golf cart?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by easily confused at 8:30 AM on March 25, 2017 (6 comments)

Yahoo's defining moment had nothing to do with its accomplishments. When we look back on Yahoo knowing what we do today, it's clear that Yahoo's true self was revealed in a single, stark meme. I'm talking, of course, of the infamous Yahoo Answers query "how is babby formed?"
posted to MetaFilter by veedubya at 1:44 AM on March 22, 2017 (61 comments)

The President and his party continued their path of destruction, announcing a new travel ban, suspending new visas for citizens of six majority-Muslim countries and all refugees, along with a poorly-received new health-care plan, amid a string of unforced errors, including the President's explosive no-evidence wiretapping tweets (which we shouldn't take too literally), his staff's scramble to try to defend their boss's latest mess, and the continuing efforts to investigate Russia's role in the campaign and Attorney General Jeff Sessions for providing false testimony.
posted to MetaFilter by zachlipton at 12:48 AM on March 8, 2017 (2257 comments)

The Hamilton Hustle. Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder
posted to MetaFilter by no regrets, coyote at 12:52 PM on March 7, 2017 (97 comments)